I give it six months before he's back near the top of the Beltway leadership class. That's just the way things go. Via CNBC
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said Wednesday that he will resign from the board at OpenAI after the release of emails between him and the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Summers had announced Monday that he would be stepping back from all public commitments, but it was not immediately clear whether that included his position at the artificial intelligence startup.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to have served, excited about the potential of the company, and look forward to following their progress,” Summers said in a statement to CNBC.
[...] “I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” Summers said in a statement to CNBC on Monday.
See, his only mistake was to continue being pals with Epstein! Everyone loved Epstein, what's the big deal? Just an oopsie! How could he have known?
As for the content of the emails… much of it is, in a word, gross. Certainly, we all write emails that, deprived of context, could embarrass us if they went public. But Summers’ emails went to a deeper, darker place; there is no context that absolves them. An ongoing theme is his recurring need for fraternal support from Epstein, repeatedly asking for advice on how to prolong an affair with a younger woman who was not his wife. In one exchange, Epstein called himself Summers’ “wing man.” The two men referred to the object of Summers’ lust — reported by the Harvard Crimson to be a Chinese economist — as “peril,” apparently short for “yellow peril,” the racist canard dating to Western imperialism of the late 19th century. When the clandestine relationship appeared to be fizzling out, Summers lamented that he “dint [sic] want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.” That sounds disturbingly like a sexual quid pro quo. In November 2018 Summers wrote, “I think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor,” which is the kind of relationship that should make Harvard think twice about Larry Summers, teacher.
There are so many reasons Summers should long ago have been chased from the public square. His links with shady companies; his deeply offensive comments about women in academia; his puzzling reputation for being a policy genius in the 2008 crash; his stabbing Biden in the back because the administration realized how bad he was and pushed him out the door, and so on. (Hat tip Atrios.)
Plus, he's an austerity junkie (publicly pecked Biden's rescue plan to bits) and just generally a bad economist. But once you've made it to the elite class, the fact that he may have once been right is enough to coast for decades.
